activate windows’s review published on Letterboxd:
on 35mm at the music box
the lonely light of a screen in dark, wooden libraries. the tacking of computers searching through electronically-archived newspapers dated twenty years prior. the flipping through of brutal crime photos you weren’t meant to see. the deep darkness in the lure of criminal life is beckoned to in a deeply authentic, creative way here that hasn’t been touched on in all its infatuating ways since Zodiac, one of the essential american works; something brilliant to take your inspiration from.
at the essence of horror films there’s an amusement park-ish thrill of survival. the thrill of sitting in a theater and wanting to look away and not being able to because you’re glued to the screen, and this film makes that priority number one. does a lot of simple things very right in ways that pave towards originality first, a characteristic that makes films true classics.
the camera stays fixed on wide-angle lenses (typically used for comedies, really) that show quite a large image. plenty of times there were Tati-like moments in which the background played a greater character to the story of the frame than the foreground in a way that feels like an establishing of a real directorial trait. although this is new, fresh, etc., it also loses its value across the film when the only shot here is that of center-framed subjects in wide-angle images. the greatest strengths of the film can also feed the negative, just as the evil nature of passionate crimes here can be either riveting or monotonous. MaXXXine should take its notes on how to riff on other movies from this guy here. interesting that this is framed in the light of viral marketing tactics a-la Blair Witch Project because its certainly similar in that it’s a genuinely original statement of a film that’s trapped in the time of its inception.
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